Final Destination
by John Bigboote
Summary: Rev up your motors, ladies.


AERITH WASN'T EXACTLY THE LUCKIEST GIRL IN MIDGAR. And neither was Tifa, for that matter. The two agents of Avalanche had left the dreary and grimy city slums behind and entered the flickering neon lightning of the Delta Gamma Squiggly Line Zeta Reactor access chamber.

Tifa was focused on breaking into the control terminal so she could shut the system down. Her left ear was connected to the terminal's speaker jack through a one-way audio cable assembled from discarded metal wiring and a patchwork of rubber insulation picked out of a junk yard. Her eyes remained intensely focused on the small rectangular two-color screen mounted on the pipes feeding into the Mako assembly. A nervous-looking Aerith was watching the terminal over Tifa's shoulder and learning the ropes of the underground paramilitary faction. No one was watching her back.

Tifa keyed in the default password shared between Shinra's janitorial staff. She got nothing back from the computer. She ran dozens of commonly used phrases as she remembered them in a random order. She got nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Finally, she slammed the terminal with a high kick and heard a short ping in her earbud.

"Did it work this time?" Aerith whispered in the magenta-tinted darkness.

"Shh!" Tifa said back with her index finger to her lips.

She anxiously leaned closer to the keypad as it reacted to her brute force input. She expected the screen to say ACCESS GRANTED with blinking digitized letters. It showed another message instead.

**[NITE NITE]**

"Oops," she murmured as her famous last word. She instinctively realized she'd set off a booby trap.

Summoned by a silent alarm, a squadron of eight colossal Guard Scorpions dropped from the rafters fifty feet up and landed in a circle surrounding Tifa and Aerith. The machines opened their hydraulic mandibles and engulfed the duo in a cloud of sleeping gas powerful enough to knock anyone out at the first whiff.

Tifa flopped face-down on the grated factory floor. Aerith sprawled over on her back just beside her.

The Guard Scorpions idled with their eight pairs of minigun pinchers aimed down at the unconscious intruders. As the fumes slowly cleared, a small figure came out of her hiding spot in one of the reactor's shadowy maintenance tunnels. She was wearing a Turks suit and a gas mask with curly auburn hair sticking out the back.

Cissnei stopped in the center of the robotic guards with Aerith and Tifa crumpled at her feet. She removed her ventilator to reveal the sour look on her face.

"Great. I'm assigned to animal control duty today," she mumbled sarcastically as she glanced down at the two on the floor.

With a sigh of defeat, Cissnei straightened her black leather gloves and went to work. She started by squatting over Aerith and rummaging through her jacket. It didn't take long to pat down and confiscate the valuable Materia she was carrying. Cissnei plucked the last couple of pieces she was wearing in her hair as jewelry. As a standard precautionary measure, she tucked her index finger down the front of Aerith's dress, pulled the neckline out by an inch, and peaked down her cleavage. Some women had been known to carry Materia in unconventional spaces, but this one didn't.

Next it was Tifa's turn, and Cissnei wasn't afraid to go straight to her belt and start fidgeting around with her skirt. Cissnei collected another set of marble-shaped artifacts out of Tifa's equipment and left her officially Materia-free. Some would consider what Cissnei was doing to be intrusive. She called it being professional.

Cissnei shuffled through the two fallen fighters like she was investigating old furniture. She didn't know their names and didn't particularly care to hear their stories. They were simply enemies of the Company and, thus, undeserving to be considered a part of modern society. The one with the pink dress and the ponytail was a pretty flower who looked like she'd have a fun time getting sprayed with pesticides and experimented on by Hojo's crew. The other one in the tanktop and the suspenders looked like she desperately needed to be milked.

Cissnei stood up and slipped a handful confiscated Materia into her inside suit pocket. She turned to the Guard Scorpions with the same dull and uncaring expression she'd given the two Avalanche members. She was rather evil for someone who looked like Hermione Granger.

"I have everything I need from these criminals," she said to her robotic accomplices. "Dispose of them however you'd like."

Cissnei turned her back and wandered off through the access tunnel with her task complete. The Scorpions raised their tail-binders into the air and spread sparkling green netting across the floor. Aerith and Tifa's sleeping forms were covered completely under a blanket of tiny fiber optic strings intersecting together, forming a closed electrical circuit with two human nodes in the middle.

The Guard Scorpions switched to their high-spec visual scanners and illuminated the net with what looked like searchlights. Electrons traveled through the netting and traced the dimensions of Tifa's and Aerith's motionless forms in multiple passes. They both would have felt the increasingly stronger sting of static electricity if they hadn't been asleep during the process. The science behind it wasn't much different from seismic imaging, only it involved passing electrons through flesh instead of vibrations through rock.

The searchlights intensified their power as they glared down on Tifa and Aerith, scanning only the exact specifications of their bodies under their clothes and mapping their peaks, valleys, and anatomical quirks into memory. Their perfect likenesses were converted into gridline sculptures on a three-dimensional binary canvas. Each sequential scan revealed the another of Tifa's dimples, the angle of Aerith's shoulders, the spacing of Tifa's biceps, the placement and precise depth of Aerith's navel, and the buoyancy of Tifa's more weighty components. Special attention was paid to muscle density and mana circulation in each section of their bodies. The Shinra Corporation always strived to get the best use out of trash before throwing it away.

The extensive all-revealing anatomical studies of the condemned Avalanche agents were completed and instantly copyrighted with the current date. Anyone who wanted a full-scale tour of what Aerith or Tifa looked in the shower just needed top secret clearance to the blueprints in Shinra's R&D division. The versions the public were meant to see were already been toned down in the design software based on a pre-set list of prohibited features and optimization filters.

Specific coordinates on the wireframe models labeled as [NPL], [VGN], or [UMB] were quickly omitted and re-rendered as plain surfaces for a more streamlined appearance. Hundreds of automated scripts frantically ran through the updated models to address anything else that was detected as a drawback, a structural flaw, or just a general room for enhancement. Tifa's digitized sculpture had two things that most definitely didn't need enhanced. The system got more creative with Aerith's.

The fiber optic netting stretching across the floor sparked and crackled with excess energy while Tifa and Aerith remained sound asleep. Two of the Guard Scorpions switched off their scanners, detached themselves from the net, and crouched on their leg hydraulics as they routed all their energy to their internal systems. Their metal fuselages ejected a pair of upright oval capsules about seven feet tall and stamped with large Shinra symbols.

The capsules hummed as they came online and opened their panels. One contained the brand new Assault Unit T1-FA, a robot molded in the form of a chrome mannequin. Standing at five feet and six inches tall, the machine's anatomy was crafted with enough detail that made it explicitly female in structure, but not enough detail to be considered offensive. The more specific characteristics an authentic woman would have possessed were either filed down or smoothed over, although she had some pretty clear indications of toned hind muscles when viewed from the back. Her simplified contours were a combination of reducing assembly costs and conforming to mandates for public decency, leaving her with a form that showed off her great body design without showing off _too_ much. A body design that Shinra had legally acquired with the help of "consultants" and would proudly market as their own creation through various trade and criminal prosecution laws.

That wasn't to say she came meagerly equipped, however. T1-FA was manufactured with iron bricks on her fists and a pair of massive polished wrecking balls heaving on the front of her chassis. Her rigidly defined abdominal panels were reinforced with extra armor plating to support her top-heaviness. Her head was equipped with communication antennae shaped like small cow horns. With military grade technology mounted on a replica metal frame that anyone associated with Avalanche would recognize, her appearance discouraged Shinra's potential enemies in more ways that one. "Leave us alone or we'll own you too" could become the company motto.

The other capsule contained Support Unit A3-R15 fresh off the assembly line. With a height of five feet and four inches, she came with a more balanced build compared to her sister model and held a steel beam as if it were a staff. Glass capacitors in her elbows, knees, and the center of her chest glowed with synthesized green mana churning through turbines. An advanced propulsion system shaped like metal angel wings was built into her shoulder blades to improve her mobility. Her design prototype had been known for wearing elegant dresses that only showed the basic suggestions of her figure, but the production version skipped the entire mystery and left all of her permissible physique out in the open. One of the reasons was because it made for an excellent diversionary tactic. The average foot grunt had more trouble focusing when a gorgeous metal doll was walking toward him. Another reason was to insult the morals of the person who'd unwittingly become the model for A3-R15 and show her rebel friends what Shinra had made of her for trying to disrupt their operations.

Both T1-FA and A3-R15 had physical appearances and engineering based off of high-quality organic templates, but the programming in their circuits that determined their actions was an original patented Shinra invention. Their weaponry combined with their vividly curvaceous builds made them goddesses in an era of corporate regulation.

The netting covering Aerith's and Tifa's prone bodies sizzled as it cooled off. By design, the two unfortunate heroines have been roasted to a crisp while they slept through the manufacturing process. All that remained of them were two charred lumps that barely resembled women lying on the floor. They never even had a chance to see their perfected forms.

Aerith and Tifa had been crushed under the oppression of heavy industry, but their personal biometrics would live on in Shinra's two latest war machines.

* * *

_Author's note: I finished building a Silver Bullet Suppressor kit yesterday while I had SGDQ playing in the background. He's a chunky boy. If you put him beside the rest of my 1/144s, he sorta looks like a 1/100 pretending to be a 1/144.  
_

_Author's note 2: I bet there's a lot of rejoicing for this fic if you assume Tifa was wearing that new remake outfit everyone hates._

_Author's note 3: Mechaerith's energy capacitors were inspired by the designs in Gundam 00. She's got GN particles that work like literal magic pixie dust. The wings are just supposed to be a nod to her Cetra/Jenova/Sephiroth connection. Maybe she could get an optional mission pack that gives her an "anti-static shroud" that makes her look she's wearing a ultra-stylized plastic sci-fi version of her old dress. I'm not sure how dressing up RoboTifa would work, though.  
_


End file.
